Casio Keyboards: A Big Idea, Synthesized originally from their Calculators In 1979, a calculator came out that seemed to serve multiple masters. It was highly functional, but it served as something of a bridge between Casio’s earliest success stories and the devices that would define the company in the 1980s. This device, the Casio Melody-80, could do math, clearly, as it was a calculator, but it was also able to work as a stopwatch or an alarm clock. But the real trick, the one that makes it such an impressive artifact of 1979, is that it was able to work as a musical instrument as well — a device that had pre-programmed classical music that could be easily played, as well as the ability to work as something of a synthesizer. “As you must have figured out by now, the Melody-80 doesn’t confine its genius to strictly serious business,” a Sharper Image ad in an October 1979 edition of Popular Science proclaims. “By flicking the upper right-hand switch, you covert its calculator buttons into music keys, a full 11 note scale from A to D.” Kashio was the second-oldest of the Japanese brothers who founded Casio and the man who played a key role in inventing many of the company’s earliest products. In 1978, Toshio led the company into the electronic music market, with an array of devices that would come to set the stage for the music industry in big ways and small. Read more on how this fascinating transition took place at http://bit.ly/2eVoaMF
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